The Rise of the Arab American Left

The Rise of the Arab American Left

Author: Pamela E. Pennock

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2017-02-07

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1469630990

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In this first history of Arab American activism in the 1960s, Pamela Pennock brings to the forefront one of the most overlooked minority groups in the history of American social movements. Focusing on the ideas and strategies of key Arab American organizations and examining the emerging alliances between Arab American and other anti-imperialist and antiracist movements, Pennock sheds new light on the role of Arab Americans in the social change of the era. She details how their attempts to mobilize communities in support of Middle Eastern political or humanitarian causes were often met with suspicion by many Americans, including heavy surveillance by the Nixon administration. Cognizant that they would be unable to influence policy by traditional electoral means, Arab Americans, through slow coalition building over the course of decades of activism, brought their central policy concerns and causes into the mainstream of activist consciousness. With the support of new archival and interview evidence, Pennock situates the civil rights struggle of Arab Americans within the story of other political and social change of the 1960s and 1970s. By doing so, she takes a crucial step forward in the study of American social movements of that era.


The Impasse of the Latin American Left

The Impasse of the Latin American Left

Author: Franck Gaudichaud

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2022-04-04

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 1478022825

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In The Impasse of the Latin American Left, Franck Gaudichaud, Massimo Modonesi, and Jeffery R. Webber explore the region’s Pink Tide as a political, economic, and cultural phenomenon. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Latin American politics experienced an upsurge in progressive movements, as popular uprisings for land and autonomy led to the election of left and center-left governments across Latin America. These progressive parties institutionalized social movements and established forms of state capitalism that sought to redistribute resources and challenge neoliberalism. Yet, as the authors demonstrate, these governments failed to transform the underlying class structures of their societies or challenge the imperial strategies of the United States and China. Now, as the Pink Tide has largely receded, the authors offer a portrait of this watershed period in Latin American history in order to evaluate the successes and failures of the left and to offer a clear-eyed account of the conditions that allowed for a right-wing resurgence.


Why America Needs a Left

Why America Needs a Left

Author: Eli Zaretsky

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-04-26

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 0745656560

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The United States today cries out for a robust, self-respecting, intellectually sophisticated left, yet the very idea of a left appears to have been discredited. In this brilliant new book, Eli Zaretsky rethinks the idea by examining three key moments in American history: the Civil War, the New Deal and the range of New Left movements in the 1960s and after including the civil rights movement, the women's movement and gay liberation.In each period, he argues, the active involvement of the left - especially its critical interaction with mainstream liberalism - proved indispensable. American liberalism, as represented by the Democratic Party, is necessarily spineless and ineffective without a left. Correspondingly, without a strong liberal center, the left becomes sectarian, authoritarian, and worse. Written in an accessible way for the general reader and the undergraduate student, this book provides a fresh perspective on American politics and political history. It has often been said that the idea of a left originated in the French Revolution and is distinctively European; Zaretsky argues, by contrast, that America has always had a vibrant and powerful left. And he shows that in those critical moments when the country returns to itself, it is on its left/liberal bases that it comes to feel most at home.


The Black Book of the American Left

The Black Book of the American Left

Author: David Horowitz

Publisher: Encounter Books

Published: 2016-04-05

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1594038708

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David Horowitz spent the first part of his life in the world of the Communist-progressive left, a politics he inherited from his mother and father, and later in the New Left as one of its founders. When the wreckage he and his comrades had created became clear to him in the mid-1970s, he left. Three decades of second thoughts then made him this movement’s principal intellectual antagonist. “For better or worse,” as Horowitz writes in the preface, “I have been condemned to spend the rest of my days attempting to understand how the left pursues the agendas from which I have separated myself, and why.” When Horowitz began his odyssey, the left had already escaped the political ghetto to which his parents’ generation and his own had been confined. Today, it has become the dominant force in America’s academic and media cultures, electing a president and achieving a position from which it can shape America’s future. How it achieved its present success and what that success portends are the overarching subjects of Horowitz’s conservative writings. Through the unflinching focus of one singularly engaged witness, the identity of a destructive movement that constantly morphs itself in order to conceal its identity and mission becomes disturbingly clear. Horowitz reflects on the years he spent at war with his own country, collaborating with and confronting radical figures like Huey Newton, Tom Hayden and Billy Ayers, as he made his transition from what the writer Paul Berman described as the American left’s “most important theorist” to its most determined enemy.


Merge Left

Merge Left

Author: Ian Haney López

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2019-10-01

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1620975653

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From the acclaimed author of Dog Whistle Politics, an essential road map to neutralizing the role of racism as a divide-and-conquer political weapon and to building a broad multiracial progressive future "Ian Haney López has broken the code on the racial politics of the last fifty years."—Bill Moyers In 2014, Ian Haney López in Dog Whistle Politics named and explained the coded racial appeals exploited by right-wing politicians over the last half century—and thereby anticipated the 2016 presidential election. Now the country is heading into what will surely be one of the most consequential elections ever, with the Right gearing up to exploit racial fear-mongering to divide and distract, and the Left splintered over the next step forward. Some want to focus on racial justice head-on; others insist that a race-silent focus on class avoids alienating white voters. Can either approach—race-forward or colorblind—build the progressive supermajorities necessary to break political gridlock and fundamentally change the country's direction? For the past two years, Haney López has been collaborating with a research team of union activists, racial justice leaders, communications specialists, and pollsters. Based on conversations, interviews, and surveys with thousands of people all over the country, the team found a way forward. By merging the fights for racial justice and for shared economic prosperity, they were able to build greater enthusiasm for both goals—and for the cross-racial solidarity needed to win elections. What does this mean? It means that neutralizing the Right's political strategy of racial division is possible, today. And that's the key to everything progressives want to achieve. A work of deep research, nuanced argument, and urgent insight, Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America is an indispensable tool for the upcoming political season and in the larger fight to build racial justice and shared economic prosperity for all of us.


The Resurgence of the Latin American Left

The Resurgence of the Latin American Left

Author: Steven Levitsky

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2011-09-01

Total Pages: 498

ISBN-13: 1421401614

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Latin America experienced an unprecedented wave of left-leaning governments between 1998 and 2010. This volume examines the causes of this leftward turn and the consequences it carries for the region in the twenty-first century. The Resurgence of the Latin American Left asks three central questions: Why have left-wing parties and candidates flourished in Latin America? How have these leftist parties governed, particularly in terms of social and economic policy? What effects has the rise of the Left had on democracy and development in the region? The book addresses these questions through two sections. The first looks at several major themes regarding the contemporary Latin American Left, including whether Latin American public opinion actually shifted leftward in the 2000s, why the Left won in some countries but not in others, and how the left turn has affected market economies, social welfare, popular participation in politics, and citizenship rights. The second section examines social and economic policy and regime trajectories in eight cases: those of leftist governments in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Venezuela, as well as that of a historically populist party that governed on the right in Peru. Featuring a new typology of Left parties in Latin America, an original framework for identifying and categorizing variation among these governments, and contributions from prominent and influential scholars of Latin American politics, this historical-institutional approach to understanding the region’s left turn—and variation within it—is the most comprehensive explanation to date on the topic.


Hollywood Left and Right

Hollywood Left and Right

Author: Steven J. Ross

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 2011-09-06

Total Pages: 513

ISBN-13: 0195181727

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In Hollywood Left and Right, Steven J. Ross tells a story that has escaped public attention: the emergence of Hollywood as a vital center of political life and the important role that movie stars have played in shaping the course of American politics.Ever since the film industry relocated to Hollywood early in the twentieth century, it has had an outsized influence on American politics. Through compelling larger-than-life figures in American cinema--Charlie Chaplin, Louis B. Mayer, Edward G. Robinson, George Murphy, Ronald Reagan, Harry Belafonte, Jane Fonda, Charlton Heston, Warren Beatty, and Arnold Schwarzenegger--Hollywood Left and Right reveals how the film industry's engagement in politics has been longer, deeper, and more varied than most people would imagine. As shown in alternating chapters, the Left and the Right each gained ascendancy in Tinseltown at different times. From Chaplin, whose movies almost always displayed his leftist convictions, to Schwarzenegger's nearly seamless transition from action blockbusters to the California governor's mansion, Steven J. Ross traces the intersection of Hollywood and political activism from the early twentieth century to the present.Hollywood Left and Right challenges the commonly held belief that Hollywood has always been a bastion of liberalism. The real story, as Ross shows in this passionate and entertaining work, is far more complicated. First, Hollywood has a longer history of conservatism than liberalism. Second, and most surprising, while the Hollywood Left was usually more vocal and visible, the Right had a greater impact on American political life, capturing a senate seat (Murphy), a governorship (Schwarzenegger), and the ultimate achievement, the Presidency (Reagan).


The Rise of a New Left

The Rise of a New Left

Author: Raina Lipsitz

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2022-09-27

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1839764260

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HOW THE FIRST MAJOR LEFTWING GENERATION SINCE THE SIXTIES HAS SHAPED ELECTORAL POLITICS The mushrooming rolls of the Democratic Socialists of America, Marxist explainers in Teen Vogue, and the outsized impact of the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all herald a new, youth-inflected radical politics. The Rise of a New Left gets behind the headlines about AOC and her cohort of elected officials to tell the stories of the young organizers who created the Squad and the new social movements that have roiled US politics, from the DSA to the Sunrise Movement to Justice Democrats. Ranging across the country to describe grassroots organizing in places like rural Pennsylvania, upstate New York, Kentucky, Florida, and California, this book examines the panoply of strategies and struggles of activists working in—and trying to transform—electoral politics and the climate justice, racial justice, and labor movements. Alongside Ocasio-Cortez, we hear from the even younger Alexandra Rojas, one of the strategists who guided her political insurgency. Propelled by scores of immersive and absorbing conversations on political strategy with young activists determined to reshape the country, this book—by a writer who is herself a member of this generational movement—is a riveting account of a resurgent left.


Unholy Alliance

Unholy Alliance

Author: David Horowitz

Publisher: Regnery Publishing

Published: 2006-02-02

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9780895260260

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The bestselling Unholy Alliance-now in paperback! Former Leftist radical David Horowitz blows the lid off the dangerous liaison between U.S. liberals and Islamic radicals. With America's battle against the disastrous force of terrorism at hand, Horowitz takes us behind the curtain of the unholy alliance between liberals and the enemy-a force with malevolent intentions, and one that Americans can no longer ignore.